"Simply Not Good Enough" - $234 billion ML scandal at Danske Bank focuses on Estonian branch where red flags were raised in 2014, IT Partly Blamed

The money laundering scandal at Danske Bank (literally "Danish Bank", whose motto is "Making More Possible") led to the resignation of Thomas Borgen, CEO. Denmark's business minister, Rasmus Jarlov, expressed his disappointment, with the remark "simply not good enough". Shares fell by 8% as the bank admitted a "significant part of the payments" were suspicious. A whistleblower raised concerns in the Estonian branch as early as 2014 but this was not properly investigated and information was not shared with the board. Prior to resigning, Borgen had been cutting costs and shifting the bank's focus to wealthier clients to compete with Nordea, the Nordic region's biggest bank. IT has been partly blamed, with a decision not to integrate the Danske Bank Group platform into the Estonian subsidiary, evading AML procedures as well as transaction and risk monitoring.

Don't Blame Brexit is War Cry from LMH Grad Dom Raab

Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab (who took over from David Davis in July 2018), is chastising companies for blaming bad performance on Brexit. This is particularly in light of John Lewis' reported 99% drop in first half profits. Sir Richard Mayfield, Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership, said "these are challenging times in retail". Dominic studied at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford. Richard (real first name Andrew) has an MBA from Cranfield.

Auto-Ethernet Extravaganza - NXP Swallows OmniPHY

The world's largest supplier of automotive chips, NXP Semiconductors, has announced its acquisition of OmniPHY, a networking IP startup, for better bandwidth on its Ethernet solutions, for an undisclosed sum. This will complement NXP's existing products based on standards like CAN, LIN and FlexRay.

OmniPHY has been a regular on the conference trail showcasing its Automotive IP solutions and support for cars becoming "Servers on Wheels". The suffix PHY comes from the IEEE shortform for a physical layer communication protocol.

Alexander Tan is NXP's Vice President of Automotive Ethernet Solutions since May 2017, based in San Jose, California, and has Ethernet experience from Fairfield County-founded National Semiconductor (now acquired by Texas Instruments) and other firms.

CAN standard (Controller Area Network) is a vehicle bus standard that allows microcontrollers to communicate, via a message-based protocol, in applications without a host computer. Development on the CAN bus started in 1983 at Bosch, with the first chips produced by Intel and Philips. The first production vehicle to employ this technology was the Mercedes-Benz W140 in 1991.

LIN (Local Interconnect Network) is a cheaper to implement version of CAN. It was created in the 1990s by the LIN Consortium founded by five automakers (BMW, Volkswagen, Audi, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz).

Arg Peso Crisis As Pres Macri Invokes Austerity as Leliq Rate Rises to 60%, Brazil Struggling

Argentina has announced sweeping reforms to kill the budget deficit in the wake of the peso crisis and to create conditions to enable a $50bn funding opportunity from the IMF. 2018 has seen the peso slide to 50% of its value against the dollar. The raising of USD interest rates has made it harder for certain countries, Argentina included, to pay its dollar-denominated debts. Argentina's central bank  (BCRA - Banco Central de la Republica Argentina) also raised its benchmark Leliq rate to 60% at the end of August to stablise the currency. With the Turkish lira down 44% against the dollar talk of an emerging market contagion is worrying investors. The Brazilian real is the third-worst performing EM currency down 20% against the dollar.

JP Morgan Hiring Technologists to "Potentially Transform Financial Services"

JP Morgan has taken a bet on machine learning hiring Manuela Veloso, head of CMU's machine learning department, in May.

Nvidia Q2 2018 Profits Up 40% But Competitors Crank up the Heat with Custom Silicon

Stellar Performance

Nvidia announced Q2 revenues of $3.12 billion a rise of 40% from 2017. Performance gains came from the gaming segment comprising graphics chips bundled with personal computers. Data center business grew 83% with demand from Google and Amazon for running computations in the cloud. Disappointing was the fall in demand for digital currency chips, leading to revenue decline of 54% from last year.

Competition from "Custom Silicon"

Competition may come from a number of areas. Google and Baidu are investing in custom silicon, with Google's hardware projects run by former Motorola president, Rick Osterloh. For machine learning specifically, Google has a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) to run neural networks at scale. In the automotive client space, Nvidia's autonomous driving chipset, Xavier, is under threat as Tesla aims to adopt its own machine learning silicon.

Traditional Competitors

Advanced Micro Devices is planning to release graphics chips for machine learning based on 7nm technology next year. Intel is also wanting to up its game, hiring AMD chief architect, Raja Koduri, to head up its graphics card business set to deliver product in two years.  Nvidia will likely respond by upping the stakes in research and development. Expenses could run to $870m in Q3.

Keeping it Real

Nvidia's Jensen Huang presents at the SIGGRAPH Graphics Technology Conference (GTC). This builds real-time awareness of the company's latest product innovations and drives fan following.

Capacity Constraints in MLCC Market poised to Grow by $2bn over Next Five Years

The $5.5bn market for MLCCs (multi-layer ceramic capacitors) is poised to grow to $7.4bn over the next five years, but capacity shortages prevail amongst the top three manufacturers who supply 60% of the market. Samsung Electro-Mechanics has said it will halt new orders and Murata is expanding manufacturing by 10%. The third major player is Taiyo Yuden. Customers are considering alternatives such as tantalum-based polymer electrolytic capacitors (KO-CAPS).